With a good Mexican dinner, and the Dutch premiere of WALL-E, we’ve said goodbye to four of the Blender Institute crew.

Margreet Riphagen, Blender Institute producer for a year, accepted a great job at the Institute of Network Cultures. It’s also in Amsterdam center, so we’ll see her around regularly!
Campbell Barton, Blender developer and TD , went back to his girls in Melbourne Australia. He’ll be working wrapping up Apricot remotely for a month, at least.
Dariusz Dawidowski, 3D game artist and level designer, goes back today to his hometown in Poland. He’ll help wrapping up the Crystal Space game level(s) during next month.
Frank Richter, Crystal Space 3D engine developer, already found another room to live in Amsterdam, he’ll keep coding on CS and is currently seeking for a game developer job in Amsterdam (know any? contact him!).

Thanks a lot Margreet & guys! we’ll miss you!

Currently still here: Chris + Pablo to wrap up the Apricot project, Brecht to do cool coding work, and myself… in a week I’ll leave for Siggraph, and when I’m back we should pick up the mythical 2.5 coding project… 🙂

Picture: see us walking to the restaurant in the cool new Apricot memorial Yofrankie shirts! People from left to right: Frank, Chris, Dariusz, Brecht, Campbell, Ton, Pablo (half), 2nd picture: Chris, Campbell, Pablo. More pictures in Gallery)

The NLGD Festival of Games takes place from 14 to 22 June 2008 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

The event is a platform and a meeting point for the European games community. NLGD is one of the sponsors of the Apricot game. The NLGD offers a platform to the strongly upcoming game-industry. Too often one tends to think about games as merely games for the youngsters. The NLGD shows by means of activities, publications and events that games and the game-industry have a huge social, economic and cultural impact.

Blender Institute will give short demonstrations on Thursday and Friday in the Expo Village. If you are interested please pass by and on the artists or main developers will give you a demonstration about Blender and Crystal Space. Also Ton Roosendaal will give a presentation on Friday in the Central Museum, de Refter, from 10.45 till 11.30. For more information about the venue, route description and speakers download here the pdf.

Planning a game project is not easy… and especially not to define when things are really good enough. On many parts you can work virtually forever! To ensure we have a good balance between quality and quantity, we’ve defined three main focus points for the next 6 weeks.

1) Full functional CrystalSpace game prototype

• the main character in perfect user control, well animated, and with advanced interaction with environment
• stunning visuals
• one quest (the “sheep game”)
• game intro “cinematic”, menu and overlays

2) Project presentation

• CS players + game running cross platform (Linux, OSX, Windows)
• Blender-CS integration (level editor) installation
• Howto docs, tutorials, videos
• DVD contents authoring (html menus, etc)

Getting the main character system finished on industry quality level is most probably going to take Pablo and Darius full-time. Frank will continue work on visual quality and speed.
To allow Chris and Pablito to work ahead, and provide them with sufficient challenges, they’ll work on prototyping the other characters and a new level in Blender’s game engine:

3) Blender Game Engine version (new!)

• use Blender GE as design and rapid prototyping tool for new characters and levels
• test implementation in Blender GE of current game ideas

It’s been surprisingly easy already to quickly rebuild in Blender the basic Apricot game experience. Will be interesting to see in a couple of weeks how it compares! However, I still expect that CS will allow far more detailed and advanced games… and Blender GE prove its value as tool for artists to design and develop ideas with.
But, we’re glad that there’s time and interest in using and hopefully improving this part of Blender!

-Ton-

(Images: today’s snapshots of work in progress. All with unfinished shadow/light mapping. First and third is CS, others is Blender GE.)

What can you do to make Happy Blender Institute much more happier ? You would order a cake for us ! 🙂 An Apricot cake. Today one person from Blender’s community surprised us with apricot and rise cakes ! Thanks a lot ! Really appreciate 🙂 What community can do for us except coffee machine and cakes and of course DVD-pre orders 🙂 ? Well.. we accepting also beer for example 😉

Hmm bazooka you say…

I’ll be at Libre Graphics Meeting in Wrocław/Poland (Thursday 08th May – Sunday 11th May). This is third edition of this event where people interested about free graphic tools like for example Gimp, Scribus, Krita, Inkscape and ofcourse Blender can meet together. You can expect Blender workshop also Apricot and Peach presentation.

Apricot presentation will be in Saturday 10th 15:30 – 16:15 room D-20 B, so don’t miss it ! But if you do – not a problem because we will show full report here too.
More info: LGM 2008 page.